Apple can’t have an injunction against Samsung phones, court rules

Samsung lost two lawsuits against Apple, but won't be stopped from selling phones.

Back in May of this year, a jury awarded Apple $120 million in damages in its second major patent trial against Samsung. Apple also asked the court to ban the sale of those Samsung phones that infringed on its three patents in question. But today, Northern California District Court Judge Lucy Koh ruled that Apple had not proven to the court that it deserves an injunction against infringing Samsung products.

First and most importantly, Apple has not satisfied its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm and linking that harm to Samsung’s exploitation of any of Apple’s three infringed patents. Apple has not established that it suffered significant harm in the form of either lost sales or reputational injury. Moreover, Apple has not shown that it suffered any of these alleged harms because Samsung infringed Apple’s patents. The Federal Circuit has cautioned that the plaintiff must demonstrate a causal nexus between its supposed harm (including reputational harm) and the specific infringement at issue. Apple has not demonstrated that the patented inventions drive consumer demand for the infringing products.

This is the second time that Koh has ruled against an injunction for Apple after the jury ruled that Samsung's products infringed the iPhone maker's patents. Back in 2012, Apple won a whopping $1.05 billion in damages from Samsung, but months later, Judge Koh denied an injunction against Samsung. Then, as now, the judge ruled that Apple hadn't shown the court that its design patents had caused irreparable harm to the company.

Apple had also petitioned the International Trade Commission (ITC) to grant it a US trade ban against Samsung's infringing phones from the 2012 case. The ITC agreed with Apple and banned Samsung's Transform SPH-M920 and Continuum SCH-1400 from being sold in the US. Due to the small size of the market for those phones, the win for Apple was more symbolic.

The three patents in question this time around cover Apple's quick links feature, the “slide to unlock” patent, and a patent on Apple's autocorrect. Although Apple originally asked the court for $2.2 billion from Samsung, the jury ultimately served Apple a Pyrrhic victory, awarding just 5 percent of that requested amount.

The two companies seem to be retreating from full-blown patent wars as definitive victories have been few and far between. Earlier this month, Apple and Samsung agreed to drop their lawsuits in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, the UK, France, and Italy. The two companies did not agree to settle in the US, however.